Women's and Gender Studies
Permanent URI for this collection
Exploring feminist theoretical perspectives and analyzing the structural and interpersonal dimensions of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality
Browse
Recent Submissions
- Transformation: Toward a People’s Democracy - Essays and SpeechesPharr, Suzanne (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2021-09-13)Transformation: Toward a People’s Democracy is a movement book for anyone working for an expansive vision of social justice. Here Suzanne Pharr offers a clear and compelling vision for action amid social and political turmoil. Drawing on decades of work on the frontlines of social movements, Pharr’s writings create a real-time chronicle of on-the-ground organizing and the historical significance of struggles for freedom and democracy. Pharr, a Southern queer feminist and anti-racist organizer, explores the pitfalls and the strengths within social justice movements. Her writings reflect the interchange of ideas and the collective work of thinkers and organizers who led activists to lift up the liberation of gender and sexuality, to fight both domestic and state violence, to advance anti-racist strategies and the leadership of people of color, to work against the advancement of rapacious capitalism, and to confront the rise of the Right in all of its forms. Transformation examines not just what happened but how it happened in the battles against numerous forms of oppression including economic injustice, racism, sexism, heterosexism, transphobia, and nationalism. Taken together, Pharr’s writings give activists and scholars a way to understand decades of attacks on civil rights while offering a roadmap that shows the way toward a people’s democracy where everyone has full participation, voice, a fair share of the benefits, justice, and dignity.
- Gender, Bodies and Technology Conference 2010(Virginia Tech, 2010-04)A program for the conference, held April 22-24, 2010, at the historic Hotel Roanoke in Roanoke, Virginia. This conference showcased scholarship that explored the role of technologies, broadly defined, in constructing, reinforcing and destabilizing gendered bodies.
- Geography and the Environment Through Kitchenspace: Cultural Ecology in the House-lot Garden in Central MexicoChristie, Maria Elisa (Virginia Tech. University Libraries, 2018-03-16)The WGD program at CIRED has conducted a monthly discussion series for over a decade. Students, faculty, staff and members of the community are encouraged to attend the discussions and bring their ideas and questions. The series offers an opportunity for scholars and development practitioners to share their research and knowledge surrounding gender and international development with the Virginia Tech community and beyond.
- Inter-American Encounters in the Travel and Migration Narratives of Mayra Montero and Cristina García: Toward a Decolonial Hemispheric FeminismGillman, Laura J. (University of Chicago Press, 2014)This essay merges scholarship on coloniality and hemispheric theories to elaborate a hemispheric decolonial feminism. I adopt this approach to illustrate how two Cuban exile writers, Mayra Montero and Cristina García, located at different sites in the hemisphere, create narratives that expose and provide positive alternatives to Western knowledge systems and their mechanisms for reproducing asymmetrical power relations in the Americas. A comparative analysis of their work reveals that travel and migration narratives provide an oppositional ideological-discursive location from which feminists along the North-South axes combat the power that regimes based on coloniality exercise to alienate and exclude. Their narratives illustrate the dialectical permutations of historically continuous encounters between the Anglo-European and the American subaltern around conflictive ways of being and knowing—those based in Western scientific paradigms and those based in the Caribbean’s African-derived cosmologies of vodou and Santería.
- Narrative as a Resource for Feminist Practices of Socially Engaged Inquiry: Mayra Montero’s In the Palm of DarknessGillman, Laura J. (Wiley, 2013)Against the view that the physical sciences should be the privileged source of reliable knowledge within the academy in general, and in philosophy in particular, this essay argues that an interdisciplinary approach to knowledge-production, one that includes social and psychological assessment as well as narrative analysis, can better capture the diverse range of human epistemic activities as they occur in their natural settings. Postpositivist epistemologies, including Lorraine Code’s social naturalism, Satya Mohanty’s and Paula Moya’s postpositivist literary and pedagogical projects, and Linda Alcoff’s dialogical template for knowledge form the basis of a revised naturalized epistemology that is more accountable to a socially engaged inquiry. This revised naturalism shifts orientation from the idealized setting of the laboratory and its a priori conditions for knowledge to localized settings, where knowledge emerges out of diverse contextualized interpretations of the natural and social world that interlocutors produce as they dialogue with one another. Mayra Montero’s neocolonial narrative thematizes the spatial shift of scientific activity, showing how epistemic authority, aligned with North American interests and regional identity, is established, withheld from others, and contested.
- Transforming PlacesSmith, Barbara Ellen; Fisher, Steve (2014-02-18)